Computer-based handwriting recognition systems, can be used for characters that are written directly onto a touch sensitive input (e.g., screen), and/or for characters scanned from a written document. When characters are written onto a screen for example, to be recognized (e.g., and digitized) it is often referred to as online recognition. East Asian written languages, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, can comprise thousands of characters. Recognition systems usually comprise a character classifier that compares the written unknown sample against a trained model. Users of the handwriting recognizers prefer that it yields accurate results; however, as a number of potential characters increases, memory requirements for storing such a classifier also increase.